I really feel that everyone who makes something improves the world just a little bit. But not everyone feels that way. I had a playful argument with an art student at the Armory Show last week. She said she felt guilty producing canvases that cluttered up an already full world. I said that to me no art is a waste of space. It's cars, roads, suburbs, wheat fields, and the sea which are a waste of space!
(Especially the sea. Oh, and the whole of space is a waste of space too.)
― Momus, Sunday, 3 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Never felt it in really overwhelming terms, but more than once from family and others there was the hint that I should be doing more with my writing in terms of fiction, though to be more accurate I was the one who put the pressure on myself more over time. So when I wrote the novel, it was interesting to have that small monkey off my back.
― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 3 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― electric sound of jim, Sunday, 3 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― davide, Monday, 4 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Is creativity of itself a worthwhile/ultimate value, whatever we may think of what's created?
Why reduce the notion of 'creativity' to what is *produced*? Isn't that a reduction of a potentially rich notion to a banal means-ends equation? You can think creatively, talk creatively, live your life creatively, all that stuff that mostly eludes the radar - can't you? Maybe this is just another way of saying that everyone's necessarily creative *anyway*, and that hiving off the bits relating to certain kinds of art and cultural practice is a rhetorical maneouvre that isn't as democratising as it might first appear but in fact practices a kind of elitism?
― Ellie, Monday, 4 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
The idea of creativity for its own sake - of art as something without purpose - is fairly recent. It's born, surely, out of the same spirit of individualism which animates (or has been co-opted into animating) the money-oriented society that is often cast as creativity's enemy. Pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies have traditionally been suspicious or dismissive of art which wasn't designed to improve in some religious or social sense. How do we disentangle the romantic and the capitalist threads - if, that is, we need to?
And if there is a social pressure to be creative, is it something that's being encouraged in place of a social pressure to be collective?
― Tom, Monday, 4 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― electric sound of jim, Monday, 4 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― ARTISTS WITHOUT TEXTS, Monday, 4 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
(Especially the sea. Oh, and the whole of space is a waste of space too.)"
i like the sea better than i like most music.
― Wyndham Earl, Tuesday, 5 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link